The Miracle of the Black Leg

Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of Law

By Patricia J. Williams

With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Patricia J. Williams, the renowned legal scholar and former Nation magazine columnist —aka “the Mad Law Professor”—offers an expansive and deeply humane lens to a new collection of essays that explore the tricky places where history, law, and identity collide. “I spend a great deal of time thinking about the body as property,” she writes, “wondering to what extent any of us are truly ‘autonomous’ rather than just interconnected puzzle bits of each other. Do we have anything like a considered ethic of care for how we borrow, attach, lean on, fit together, or abandon the pieces of one another?”